Chapter 61: The Five Seconds After
Chapter 61: The Five Seconds After
I spent forty minutes doing nothing, and that was the part she watched hardest.
The Bramble-Hulk was in a sunken field behind the hedgerow — a hunched mass of grey-brown muscle about the size of a horse, with a hide like bark and a head that sat too low on its shoulders. It had been feeding on something and had settled into the shade at the western end, and every few minutes it lifted its head and turned it slowly through about ninety degrees.
I lay in the hedge and built the whole thing in my head before I moved a muscle.
The escape line first, because that’s the one that kills people. If it broke, it would break east along the sunken field, because that was the only side without a bank. Which meant Liora went east.
Then the blind ground. Its head sat low, which meant anything below the line of the drainage cut was invisible to it as long as I stayed off the lip. The cut ran three-quarters of the way to the shade at the western end.
Then the noise. Leaf litter under the hedge, fine, no problem. Twelve metres of dry chalk between the cut and the shade, which would crunch. Then bramble, which snags.
Then where I’d be standing afterwards.
I want to be clear that I did consider that. I looked at the ground behind my firing position and I noted the bank and I thought right, and then I go back that way, and I moved on, and that casual half-second of consideration is the entire subject of this Chapter.
"You’re not moving," Liora observed, at some point.
"I’m looking."
"I can see that. I’m complimenting you. It’s uncomfortable for both of us." She settled onto her elbows beside me. "Go on, then. Show me the trick."
I turned on the Veil and went into the drainage cut.
I have no idea what it looks like from outside. What it feels like is nothing — I move, and the world doesn’t respond. There’s no sensation of being hidden. There is only the increasingly strange experience of being twenty metres from something enormous and watching it not care.
I did the whole approach at the speed of a man walking through a dark house. Down the cut, bent double, three minutes. Onto the chalk, where I put every foot down on its outside edge and rolled it, and where Feline Grace took the weight off a loose flake before I’d registered it was loose. Two minutes for twelve metres.
At the halfway point, the Bramble-Hulk lifted its head and turned it straight at me.
I stopped mid-stride with one foot off the ground and I did not breathe.
It looked. It had a flat brown eye about the size of a fist and it swept it right across me, and I stood in open chalk in daylight with nothing between us and my heart trying to climb out through my throat.
It can’t smell me. It can’t hear me. But it can absolutely see me if it decides I’m a thing.
The head kept moving. The eye went past.
Twenty seconds later I put my foot down.
I got to eight metres, into the bramble at its flank, and set up in the one position I’d picked out from the hedge — braced across a fallen post, rifle steady, the whole length of its ribs open to me.
Then I put a round into the soft seam behind its foreleg where the bark-hide gave way to something that wasn’t.
The Veil broke on the shot. I felt the world come back and notice me, which is the closest thing to a sensation the skill has ever produced.
The strike was perfect. I’d like that noted, because everything after it wasn’t.
The Bramble-Hulk screamed and came round at me in less time than it takes to describe. Not east, toward the open ground; at the noise, at the smell of powder, at the thing eight metres away that had just put a hole in it.
I did what I had planned to do. I went backwards.
And discovered, in about a second and a half, that the bank I had earmarked as my line of retreat was a thing I had assessed from the hedgerow, from thirty metres away, at an angle, and that from here it was two metres of loose earth and bramble root and I was not going up it fast enough with a rifle in my hands.
I got three steps and my heel went into a root hollow, and Feline Grace saved my ankle and did nothing at all about the four hundred kilos of furious tree coming at my chest.
Then Liora hit it from the side.
She came off the top of the bank and put both knives into the wound I’d made, using her whole falling weight, and the Hulk staggered sideways and swung at her and she was already gone — off, out, five metres away, drawing it in a wide arc across the chalk.
"The bank’s rubbish!" she shouted, entirely conversationally, while a monster tried to take her head off. "East, Adrian, get on the east side of it!"
I got on the east side of it.
After that it was work, and it was shared, and I did contribute — three more rounds into the same seam while it was turning after her, and the last one went somewhere important, because it went down on its front end and stayed down long enough for her to get in under its jaw.
We killed it. It took another four minutes and neither of us was hurt, and by the end of it I was shaking so hard I had to sit on the fallen post.
Liora cleaned her knives on the grass and then came and stood in front of me with her tail moving slowly.
"That," she said, "was the best approach I have ever seen anyone make. And I have watched professionals."
"Thank you."
"You crossed twelve metres of open chalk in daylight and it looked at you and didn’t see a reason to see you." Her ears were forward. "That skill is worth more than your rifle."
"Right."
"And you nearly died."
"...Right."
"You planned the first strike." She crouched down so we were level, and she wasn’t teasing at all now. "You forgot to plan the five seconds after it."
I didn’t have anything to say to that, because it was exactly correct and I’d felt the shape of it while I was falling backwards up a bank.
"The Veil gives you the beginning," she went on. "That’s all it gives you. It doesn’t give you an exit, and it doesn’t stop the thing turning round, and the moment you fire it’s over and you’re just a man standing in a bramble patch eight metres from something that wants you dead. So you don’t ask how do I get there." She tapped my knee, once, hard. "You ask where am I standing when it looks at me. You answer that first. Then you work backwards to the approach."
"Escape route. Terrain. Something between me and it."
"Traps. Distance. Someone covering you." She stood up. "Or a second shot you’ve already decided on before you take the first. Anything. But you decide it while you’re lying in a hedge, not while you’re going up a bank on your arse."
We walked back with the good cuts of the Hulk in the ring and the light going orange over the plantation.
She was different on the way home, and it took me a while to place it. She stayed closer than she used to. Twice she put a hand flat on my back for no reason at all when we crossed broken ground, and once, at the gate, she took my sleeve to move me two feet to the left away from a stack of pallets that wasn’t going to fall on anyone.
[Manifestation Remaining: 04:12:38]
Neither of us mentioned that.
Back in the room the energy went out of the evening. She sat on the floor with her back against the bed frame and her knees up, and she got quieter, and quieter, and eventually she stopped answering the easy things with anything more than a hum.
I watched her turn her own knife over in her hands three times without looking at it.
"Liora."
"Mm."
"What is it you’re not saying?"